Friday, 31 July 2009

Evolution causes women to become more beautiful, claims a fresh study. Men, however, are hardly any more handsome than their supposed cave-dwelling ancestors.

According to Markus Jokela of the University of Helsinki, beautiful women get 16 per cent more children than plain-looking ladies. The majority of their children are girls who grow up to become beautiful women. As this has been going on for many generations, women have become physically much more attractive than men.

In his study, Jokela used data collected in the USA. The lives of 1244 women and 997 men were followed for four decades. The women’s physical attractiveness was assessed from photographs.

Previously, Satoshi Kanazawa noticed that good-looking parents are more likely to get more daughters than sons. He says that this is a strategy that evolution has programmed into human DNA.

According to Kanazawa, beauty is heritable and it is thus no wonder that as generations have followed each other, women have become more beautiful than men.

The recent study does not reveal anything new. Usually, children look like their parents, and the daughters of a pretty woman tend to be pretty. However, this does not have to do with Darwinian evolution.

But since it is Darwin’s 200th anniversary, even this research is interpreted according to the Darwinian model in which storytelling plays a major role.

Beauty is probably a consequence of natural selection that is not the same thing as evolution.

Evolutionists assume that in our ape-like past, the aesthetic differences between males and females were not as pronounced as they are today.

In contrast, the Bible says that in the beginning man was created in the image of God. Living in a perfect world, Adam and Eve were certainly perfect in their beauty.

Thursday, 30 July 2009

Old monkey fossils have not made headlines since the Ida fiasco. Perhaps for this reason Aamulehti, the second largest daily in Finland, recently reminded its readers that Darwinian evolution is still a model that explains everything, including lactose tolerance.

Weakening lactose tolerance in adults is due to evolution, says geneticist Irma Järvelä in an article in Aamulehti. She explained that when a child is weaned the mother becomes free to get more offspring. In other words, evolution acts in a teleological way, making the child dislike milk.

The explanation is a typical example of Darwinian storytelling of the evolution did it or Darwin of the gaps type just so stories that can never be verified empirically.

Lactose tolerance is due to a mutation that does not have anything to do with goo-to-you evolution. Darwinian evolution desperately needs mutations that would increase genetic information.

However, according to biophysicist Lee Spetner science does not know of a single case in which a point mutation would have increased genetic information.

Adults were originally unable to drink milk, but due to a genetic mutation 82 per cent of Finns are now able to digest milk. Such “mutants” are rare among the nations of eastern Asia.

Explanations of lactose tolerance are probably important for evolutionists because their founding father Charles Darwin suffered from diarrhea, bloating and flatulence that are typical symptoms of lactose intolerance.

Sunday, 26 July 2009

Could “a change in allele frequency in a population over time” have changed the cousin of this fellow into a blogger writing on the wonders of evolution?

Joel Kontinen

It seems that this blog has recently caused a considerable amount of displeasure to some readers, especially to Austin Cline of About. com, whose name I happened to mention in an earlier post.

You might guess that this displeasure stems from my reluctance to admit that Darwinian evolution is a universally acknowledged fact. Austin Cline quickly posted a reply on About.com in which he repeated his earlier thesis that belief in evolution is not dogmatic.

Cline says:

The statement "evolution is a fact" is no more a dogma than "gravity is a fact" or "plate tectonics is a fact" are dogmas. Saying that evolution or gravity is a fact is simply a recognition of reality.

Actually, creationist scientists played major roles in the discovery of both gravity and plate tectonics. Few Bible-believing scientists would doubt them. The problem is with the ideology beginning with the e-word.

Cline’s chief witness is no other than the late Stephen J. Gould, who wrote an article for Discoverer magazine in 1981 entitled Evolution as Fact and Theory.

Like Humpty Dumpty, evolutionists want to set the rules of the semantic game: “When I say a word it means exactly what I want it to mean.” For Cline, evolution is “the change in allele frequency in a population over time”.

Now, this was not the definition I was referring to, as he could easily have found out by reading some of the earlier posts I have written on this blog. No creationist that I know of doubts that animals have changed over time and do change.

What they do doubt, however, is the “goo-to-you-via-the-zoo” version in which we are all the descendants of a primeval unicellular being. That, if anything, is very dogmatic since there is no real evidence for it but it is assumed a priori.

Otherwise, they would have a Divine foot at the door. And that is something that would definitely spoil their day.

But let us return to where we began, i.e. Austin Cline’s statement on evolution being as well attested in science as gravity or plate tectonics. In his excellent book The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (2008), Dr. David Berlinski says:

Although Darwin’s theory is very often compared favorably to the great theories of mathematical physics on the grounds that evolution is as well established as gravity, very few physicists have been heard observing that gravity is as well established as evolution. They know better and they are not stupid. (p. 191)

Saturday, 25 July 2009

Scientific American is a monthly popular science magazine that has often been a flagship for Darwinian evolution. During Charles Darwin’s anniversary the magazine has remembered to remind its readers that there are good evidences of evolution – such as dog breeds.

Mirsky does not write about fossils, not even about assumed intermediate forms, which might be wise, given the recent scandal featuring the Ida fossil. Instead, he discusses dog breeds in an attempt to show that Dr. Jonathan Wells of Discovery Institute erred in saying that there is no evidence for repeated speciation without which Darwinian evolution would be impossible.

Speciation as such is not a problem in the creation model since it takes into account an animal's in-built capacity for change and adaptability. Moreover, the term created kind (baramin) in Genesis differs considerably from the modern biological concept of species.

According to Mirsky, a 180-pound (80 kg) English Mastiff differs so much from a two-pound (1 kg) Chihuahua that they should be regarded as two distinct species although they both belong to the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris. But if they were to be declared separate species, the kind of speciation required by Darwinian evolution would have occurred.

Actually, it wouldn't.

Evolutionists have often a priori given a new species name to a fossil although the animal might have belonged to an already known species. Thus, there are far more dinosaur species on paper than there ever were in real life.

Dog breeds are evidence of the great adaptability of the subspecies Canis lupus familiaris. Contrary to what evolutionists like Mirsky insist, artificial selection that produces new dog breeds does not have anything to do with evolution. It always involves a loss of genetic information. While we could breed a Chihuahua from a wolf we could not breed a wolf from a Chihuahua.

It no longer has the required genetic information.

Source:

Mirsky, Steve. 2009. Are Dog Breeds Actually Different Species? Scientific American. (June 2009) http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=an-immodest-proposal. In the magazine's paper version the column had the title An Immodest Proposal

Sunday, 19 July 2009

What if these rocks in southern Finland are 10 000 times younger than supposed?

Joel Kontinen

CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research, recently published an interesting report on the radioactive decay of thorium-228. The research throws doubt on the view that external conditions cannot have an effect on decay rates.

The new study reveals that the “closed-system, no contamination” assumption is not correct. Fabio Cardone of the Institute per lo Studio dei Materiali Nanostrutturati in Rome and his colleagues noticed that ultrasonic cavitation in water caused thorium-228 to decay 10, 000 times faster than previously supposed.

The effect of water raises interesting questions. Do other radioactive substances also decay at faster rates than previously assumed? There is plenty of water on Earth and the global flood in Noah’s days is beginning to be an even more plausible explanation for accelerated decay rates.

The CERN report also states that scientists had previously noticed minor deviations from expected decay rates.

Popular science magazines have presented radioactive decay rates as almost absolute although geology abounds with “bad dates”. The new study suggests that we should take a skeptical approach to the belief in millions of years of earth history.

Friday, 17 July 2009

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah foretold the sufferings of Jesus 700 years before they took place. Painting by El Greco (ca. 1580). Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

Fundamentalism is old-fashioned. When religions meet, they bring up new, better traits of God. This is how Robert Wright interprets the development of religions.

In contrast to Ludwig Feuerbach, Sigmund Freud or atheistic comparative religion scholars, Wright does not insists that God is a human invention. He thinks that the progress occurs in how people understand what God is like.

Wright, whose book The Evolution of God was published a few months ago, recently wrote a long article in Time magazine, outlining his views on religion. He believes that religions evolve toward a more precise understanding of God.

Unfortunately, Wright’s views of the Bible stem from liberal theology that denies the possibility of miracles and biblical prophesy. Thus Wright subscribes to the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch or the view that the different names for God in the five books traditionally ascribed to Moses reveal that they stem from different sources and were thus written by different authors.

We might use a similar criterion to claim that this blog has to have at least two writers. One of them uses the word Darwinists for supporters of evolution. The other, however, uses the term evolutionists.

Wright has also adopted the view that there are two Isaiahs in the Old Testament. Liberal theologians do not believe that Isaiah could possibly have predicted the rise of Persia and the return of the Jews from exile accurately several centuries before they took place. Instead, they claim that the second half of Isaiah was written after the exile.

It is an interesting hypothesis but there is no real evidence for it. In the Dead Sea scrolls, an entire book of Isaiah is on the same scroll. Both parts of Isaiah are stylistically and terminologically uniform. For instance, The term the Holy One of Israel occurs several times in both the early and later chapters. In addition, the New Testament writers regarded Isaiah as a work written by one and the same prophet.

In other words, one should not use bad arguments in defence of God even in Time.

Sunday, 12 July 2009

Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health and erstwhile director of the Human Genome Project, is a former atheist who converted to Christianity. He believes God used evolution as His method of creation. Recently Karl Giberson, a fellow theistic evolutionist, interviewed Francis Collins for Christianity Today.

His belief in theistic evolution prompts Collins to re-interpret Genesis. Giberson suggested that when young people read Genesis they ”think of Adam and Eve as real biological parents of the human race”. Collins pointed out that we should “read the Bible at more than the most superficial level.”

Karl Giberson has previously claimed that interpreting the creation account of Scripture literally amounts to robbing Genesis so it might not be impossible to guess what the outcome of this discussion would be.

According to Collins, evolution is more credible than creationism or intelligent design although we do not yet know all details of the development of life. But perhaps some day . . .

In ordinary language, this is usually called wishful thinking.

Francis Collins acknowledges that God is the source of all truth so that there can be no conflict between science and the Bible. As far as I know, all creationists would share this view but they disagree with Collins about the science in evolution.

Collins’ view resembles that of Hugh Ross, the foremost spokesman of progressive creationism. Ross regards nature as the 67th book of the Bible. Collins even says that God gave us the book of nature. Ross rejects Darwinian evolution. Collins accepts it. Unfortunately, both approaches require elevating science above Scripture.

And when the reigning paradigm in science is naturalism or the view that nature is all there is, Genesis becomes a myth that merely describes spiritual truth.

The scarcity of fossils does not prevent Collins from regarding evolution as fact. He says that since fossilization is ”extremely unlikely to have happened” [except in extraordinary circumstances such as the Genesis Flood], the lack of evidence is not a problem. Instead of fossils, Collins relies on the predictability of DNA sequence -based models that he hopes would ”predict the genome sequence of the common mammalian ancestor”.

The problem with this approach is that due to starting assumptions, models have a tendency to tell us exactly what we want them to tell us.

Giberson acknowledged that he did not have any first-hand knowledge of evolution:

I believe in evolution because people like you that I trust have told me it's true. I've never done a genome sequence; I've never done a fossil dig. So what do I—Karl Giberson—really know about evolution? All I know is that people I trust say it's true and people that I have less confidence in say it is not.

There seems to be nothing new under the sun. Two millennia ago, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BC - 40 AD) saw Greek philosophy in the Old Testament. While Philo saw Platonism, Giberson and Collins see Darwinism in Genesis. The original author ( Moses ) would most probably have thought that this interpretation was very odd.

Giberson, Karl W. 2009. Evolution, the Bible, and the Book of Nature. A conversation with Francis Collins. Christianity Today (10 July ) http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/julaug/evolutionthebibleandthebookofnature.html

Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health and former director of the Human Genome Project, is a former atheist who converted to Christianity. He believes God used evolution as His method of creation. Recently Karl Giberson interviewed Francis Collins, a fellow theistic evolutionist for Christianity Today.

His belief in theistic evolution prompts Collins to re-interpret Genesis. When Giberson suggested that when young people read Genesis they ”think of Adam and Eve as real biological parents of the human race”, Collins pointed out that we should “read the Bible at more than the most superficial level.”

Karl Giberson has previously claimed that interpreting the creation accounts of scripture literally amounts to robbing Genesis so I might not be impossible to guess what the outcome of this discussion would be.

According to Collins, evolution is more credible than creationism or intelligent design although we do not yet know all details of the development of life. But perhaps some day …

In ordinary language, this is usually called wishful thinking.

Francis Collins acknowledges that God is the source of all truth so that there can be no conflict between science and the Bible. All creationists I know would share this view but they disagree with Collins on the science in evolution.

Collins’ view resembles that of Hugh Ross, the foremost spokesman of progressive creationism. Ross regards nature as the 67s book of the bible. Collins even says that God gave us the book of nature. Ross rejects Darwinian evolution. Collins accepts it. Unfortunately, both approached require elevating science above Scripture.

And when the reigning paradigm in science is naturalism or the view that nature is all there is, Genesis becomes a myth that merely describes spiritual truth.

The scarcity of fossils does not prevent Collins from regarding evolution as fact. He says that since fossilization is ”extremely unlikely to have happened” [except in extraordinary circumstances such as the Genesis Flood], so lack of evidence is not a problem. Instead of fossils, Collins relies on the predictability of DNA sequence -based models that he hopes would ”predict the genome sequence of the common mammalian ancestor”.

The problem with this approach is that due to starting assumptions, models have a tendency to tell us exactly what we want them to tell us.

Giberson acknowledged that he did not have any first-hand knowledge on evolution:

I believe in evolution because people like you that I trust have told me it's true. I've never done a genome sequence; I've never done a fossil dig. So what do I—Karl Giberson—really know about evolution? All I know is that people I trust say it's true and people that I have less confidence in say it is not.

There seems to be nothing new under the sun. Two millennia ago, Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BC - 40 AD) saw Greek philosophy in the Old Testament. While Philo saw Platonism, Giberson and Collins see Darwinism in Genesis. The original author (Moses) would have thought that this interpretation was very odd.

Giberson, Karl W. 2009. Evolution, the Bible, and the Book of Nature. A conversation with Francis Collins. Christianity Today (10 July ) http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2009/julaug/evolutionthebibleandthebookofnature.html

Saturday, 11 July 2009

The belief in the ape-like traits of our supposed ancestors stems from assumptions based on an atheistic worldview. An ape will not make this kind of musical instruments.

Joel Kontinen

Science publications and natural history museums often depict our assumed forefathers as hairy ape- like creatures. However, recently Science acknowledged that this is due to the scarcity of hominid fossils. Paleoartists have simply not known what our ancestors looked like. Their assumption led them to produce illustrations of creatures that looked somewhat like chimpanzees.

Recent finds have nevertheless caused artists to reassess their views.

Most of the evolution has occurred in the description of Neanderthal men. The earliest models described them as very ape-like creatures. But many fossil finds have shown that this assumption stems from the artist’s belief in Darwinian evolution.

In reality, Neanderthal men made musical instruments, produced effective weapons and buried the dead. These are not the characteristics of apes.

Michael Balter, who wrote the article on paleoartists in Science, thinks that their assumptions about our forefathers has also had an effect on how scientists have approached hominid fossils. This has resulted in a full circle.

In other words, ape-like creatures have been a figment of Darwinian imagination, a wish to promote the good news that we are not any more special than chimpanzees to all those who are not yet convinced of the "truth" of evolution (i.e. the majority of the earth’s human population).

Tuesday, 7 July 2009

The "fact of human evolution" according to T. H. Huxley. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

Joel Kontinen

Richard Dawkins said that evolution made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. No wonder, then, that many latter day atheists are aghast at any criticism of Darwinian evolution.

For instance Austin Cline of About.com recently showed his displeasure at people who would dare doubt Darwinism. He claimed that evolution “is both theory and fact”. In the same context he said, “Everything in science is supposed to proceed by tentative theories rather than dogmatic pronouncements.”

Obviously, seen from an atheistic perspective, “evolution is fact” is not a dogmatic pronouncement. Yet many Darwinists have a prior commitment to a certain dogma. Richard Lewinton confessed that scientists often choose to make up “unsubstantiated just-so stories ” because they “have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism… Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

In other words, if a tentative theory points to a designer, it is excluded – on philosophical grounds. It is no wonder Dr. Henry Morris called his last book Some Call It Science.

The problem with Darwinian evolution is that it only allows naturalistic explanations. It is not a search for truth or even for knowledge.

Friday, 3 July 2009

Evolution is not popular in the United States - even though it is Charles Darwin’s 200th anniversary . Lucy, on tour in US museums, has failed to attract attention and according to a recent study 52 per cent of the American public believe that intelligent design explains the development of life better than the Darwinian explanation of random mutations and natural selection.

Only 33 per cent thought evolution was the better model. Of the interviewees, 7 per cent were not convinced of either view and an additional 8 per cent were unsure.

The study, carried out by Zogby International and commissioned by Discovery Institute, surveyed the views of 1 053 randomly chosen voting-age Americans. The margin of error was + / - 3.1 per cent.

The telephone survey consisted of approximately 44 questions. In addition to the development of life, it also asked about the view on the teaching of evolution in science classes. The results were interesting:

54 per cent strongly agreed that teachers and students should have the freedom to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of evolution.26 per cent somewhat agreed.6 per cent somewhat disagreed.11 per cent strongly disagreed,and the rest did not know.

In other words, 80 per cent of the interviewees would allow criticism of evolution in science classes.

The majority of Americans do not favour expelling dissenters but want more critical and honest science education. It seems that they have had enough of Darwinian hype, such as Ida, the recently advertised missing link that turned out to be more of a red herring than anything else.

Although evolutionists have a virtual monopoly on science education and control of the popular media, many still find it difficult to believe in Darwinian evolution. Even in Darwin‘s homeland Britain a sizeable portion of the population prefer to dissent from the official dogma of goo-to-you evolution.

Source:

Discovery Institute. 2009. In Darwin Anniversary Year, Zogby Poll Reveals Majority Support for Intelligent Design, Doubts about Darwinism.See the research in pdf form here .